


The Problem Solver

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:33:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This wasn't what Steve wanted from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Problem Solver

**Author's Note:**

> A quick fic written for a tumblr meme. The first line was provided for me. The rest is mine.

"Someday we'll get married to sisters and live side by side," Bucky had said. “Or Becky. You could marry Becky.”

But Steve thought Bucky was a little old to be concocting fantasies like “marriage for Steve” or “women who would decide they wanted to marry Steve,” even if the women involved were Bucky’s sisters. Actually. Especially if the women involved were his sisters. Steve’s sisters numbered exactly zero, but if he’d had a few he wouldn’t have married them off. That didn’t seem brotherly. Anyway Bucky only thought it up because Bucky also thought he was good at solving problems.

He was alright at solving problems.

Some problems were too thorny, too hard to really consider properly, nearly impossible to solve. Steve was one of these. Young women did not like him. It wasn’t anything personal. It wasn’t like they were doing anything wrong. It wasn’t like – like Bucky often complained – they were crazy or blind. 

They weren’t crazy or blind. They were just uninterested.

Right now Steve was in the elevator at Loehmann’s. And all around him there were women. The Loehmann’s top floor made a very vague attempt to acknowledge the male sex: it sold suspenders, money clips, tie pins on ugly metal racks, shapeless felt hats, starched white undershirts. But the other six floors stocked nothing that drily, hideously masculine. On the other six floors, Loehmann’s was Brooklyn’s capitol of bargain-price femininity.

So a lot of women milled about Steve right now, here in the elevator. It was a huge elevator, an old freight thing, creaky and slow. On the third floor some older women got off, and several younger ones packed on. One of these girls walked into Steve. He apologized. At his voice, she craned her head around her compact, lifted a brow, and said, “Steve?”

It was Becky Barnes.

Steve had never seriously considered whether to marry Becky or not. He was sure she’d be completely disinterested. And Becky just didn’t call up romance in his mind. She was an old friend. Or she had been. Sometime in the past few years, she’d acquired all sorts of things that made her exotic and terrifying, as far away as a Turkish princess: compacts and sort of calm in her voice and high heels almost too nice to walk in, or at least very painful-looking. So Steve was never very sure who he was addressing when he saw her. Was it Becky Barnes, world’s biggest Dodgers fan and childhood scrapping partner, who could give as good as she got in a fight against her brothers? Or the new Becky Barnes? Or did the old Becky Barnes still lurk under the skin of new, only now she was done up in lipstick and false eyelashes?

“Bucky’s here with you,” she told Steve accusingly.

That sounded like the old Becky. Sort of.

But Bucky was not here with him. Bucky had offered to come along today. He’d thought Steve was down. He’d believed Steve needed company. He’d wanted to solve this in the usual way, by arranging an afternoon doing the usual things: heading down past the Union Street Bridge to McGuirk’s gym, going to see a film, meeting some women.

Bucky thought these things were fun.

Horribly enough, with Bucky there, they  _were_. And so they confirmed what Bucky had always secretly believed: that he could fix every dour moment in Steve’s life.

Steve had asked to be left alone today.

Now he said, “Well, Buck’s—“

“Fourth floor,” said the elevator operator. “Ladies’ essentials.”

“He knows Bobby needs him to come to the football game today, doesn’t he?” said Becky.

Bobby Barnes bucked Barnes family tradition and preferred football to baseball, a high crime in the Barnes family. But the Barneses were very loyal to each other and so each Barnes child, in turn, was expected to do his or her part to aid and abet the criminal. If Bobby wanted someone to watch a football game with, Bobby would get that someone.

Becky continued, “Bobby’s such a dumbbell. He has Jane Gallo from Bergen Street  _and_  Vera Finlay from Wyckoff Street going. He forgot, and asked them both. Can you imagine? Showing up on his own, with those two poor girls each dying to go with him?”

No. No, Steve could not imagine that.

“I’m sure Buck—“ he began.

“Fifth floor,” said the elevator operator. “Shoes!”

“Bucky’s got to pull him out of it,” Becky said. Bucky was the eldest of the Barneses, and therefore tasked with cleanup on every messy occasion, something Bucky never complained about because he was good at it. So good at it that, not only did he pull his siblings out of difficult situations, but, somewhere along the way he had decided to do the same for Steve, as well.

He was very magnanimous about it.

Steve reasoned that he didn’t  _hate_  this magnanimity. Mostly. He tried to be appreciative. But he probably wasn’t ever as appreciative as he ought to be.

Well. So what? Bobby, with his football game, would provide all the appreciation Buck needed anyway.

“He’s—“ he tried.

“Sixth floor!” said the elevator operator, and before he could say what mysteries the sixth floor held, Becky spoke over him. She and Steve were the only two people left in the elevator. She said, “Make sure he goes to the football game, will you?” and then, “Oh, what happened to the fourth floor? I needed to get to the fourth floor!”

The elevator operator stared placidly at her. Becky sighed, tipped him five cents, and said, “Well, I’ll take the escalators.”

And then she was gone.

At the seventh floor Steve got off. He wandered around the store floor. An employee tried to trail him furtively, looking to help him, but Steve lost her by ducking behind a coat rack. He did not want help. Not today. Not from Bucky. And not even – he now realized stubbornly – from the employee.

Anyway if someone had come up to him and asked, “What are you looking for?” he wouldn’t have had the slightest clue what to say.

He didn’t want a new money clip, or a tie pin, or another ugly felt hat. He couldn’t afford those things at this point in the month, not with what he was saving up for. So now he looked around for the thing he _had_ come for. He nearly tripped on a slim young man standing near a display of cufflinks, and then was so embarrassed that he had to pretend he was looking for cufflinks. The young man also seemed to be looking for cufflinks. They each began to lift sets off the rack and examine them appreciatively and loudly – and in Steve’s case, entirely unnecessarily, since they were too expensive anyway. The salesgirl came by and made noises about all the wonderful fourteen carat ones she had in the back and Steve, mortified, heard himself say that this was exactly what he was looking for.

“Yes,” said the slim young man, in a very fast and sudden way.

Steve looked at him after the salesgirl had gone.

Could it—?

No.

But. Well.  _Maybe_.

“Rocky Sullivan,” Steve said suddenly. And then, after a horrible moment in which the other man said nothing at all, “These cufflinks. They—“ he trailed off lamely. “—they look like something Rocky Sullivan would wear. I mean, any gangster, I guess, or—“

He wanted to stop talking. He couldn’t. He shouldn’t have come. He should have spent the day with Bucky. That was closer to what he wanted anyway, wasn’t it? Not enough. But closer.

“—or Cagney. Because, you know—“

“Flanagan,” the slim man said. “You’re Flanagan.”

Relief took hold of Steve. He looked the young man full in the face for the first time. The young man was looking back at him. He was dark-complected, with a beaky nose and a full mouth, and he held himself a little forlornly. His eyes were very nice, though, Steve thought. Wide-set. Large. Expressive.

“Powers didn’t say you were blond,” said Rocky Sullivan, but he didn’t sound upset about it. He sounded appreciative.

It felt nice to hear appreciation from somebody.

“We should get out of here before she comes back,” Rocky continued, jerking his chin in the direction the salesgirl had gone. Steve nodded. They went to call the elevator and stood in the back, with a few feet between them, trying not to look at eachother. When they left the store Rocky didn’t seem to know where to go. Steve walked past him as calmly as he could, only a  _little_  too close. He said, in a low voice, “I don’t know if you like Powers’s place—” 

“No—“ Rocky said quickly. “No. I—I do. I don’t hate it. But honestly, I don’t know where to go, or—or how to do this. I’ve only done this a couple times, and—“

“There’s a boarding house,” Steve said, still speaking in a low voice. They fell into step together, but Rocky let him lead. Steve said, “They’re good about it. They don’t care. I can cover the room myself—“

“Oh,” said Rocky, sounding a little shocked. “Oh, thanks.”

“No problem,” Steve said quickly.

Almost too casually, Rocky slung an arm around his shoulders, the way a friend might. He said, “No problem because you solved it already,” and something about that felt  _good_ , hearing that Steve could do this. He wasn’t dead weight. Rocky liked the look of him – or at least the blondness, which was silly, but Steve would take it.

And he liked that Steve could solve their problems.

This wasn’t quite what Steve wanted. What Steve wanted would never work. And anyway Steve wasn’t the problem-solver in that relationship. Most days, he wasn’t much of a problem-solver for anybody.

This was probably why women were so disinterested in him.

Blessedly, men were not. 

**Author's Note:**

> Father Flanagan was Spencer Tracy’s character in _Boys Town_. Rocky Sullivan’s was Jimmy Cagney’s in _Angels With Dirty Faces_. Both came out in 1938, which I guess is when this fic is set.
> 
> This is probably not how gay hookups went back then. I made it up. I made the whole damn story up. ~~I'd do it again, too.~~


End file.
